Murphy High School’s football program enters the 2026 season still searching for a way to reverse a 22-game losing streak, but second-year head coach Sherman Williams says the culture inside the program is starting to shift. The Panthers, who play in the competitive Class 5A, Region 1, are coming off back-to-back 0-10 seasons and have not won a game since a 34-20 decision over Baldwin County on Oct. 20, 2023.
The numbers from the streak are stark. During the losing run, Murphy has been outscored 932-89, an average of 42.3 points allowed to just 4.04 points scored per game, and the Panthers enter 2026 riding a string of eight straight games without scoring a point. Those are the kinds of statistics that can hollow out a roster, and Williams has spent the offseason working to make sure they do not define how his players see themselves.
Speaking at recent high school football media days, Williams outlined both the difficulty of the rebuild and his approach to changing the team’s mindset. “We can’t go out and be complacent thinking that someone’s going to feel sorry for us or have sympathy for us,” Williams said. “Our motto this year is we earn everything, nothing given. Everything that we go and get, we’re going to have to earn it. Nobody’s going to give us nothing.”
A young, rebuilding roster
Williams said he has roughly eight returning starters from last season, most of whom will be sophomores or juniors, with only nine seniors on the roster and four expected to start. The offensive line returns largely intact, though those players were mostly freshmen a year ago — a group that took its lumps against older, heavier opponents but now brings varsity experience that few first-year linemen possess.
Overall, Williams said about 40 players are currently taking part in workouts, with that number expected to grow to around 50 once rising freshmen join the program — numbers well below most other programs in 5A, Region 1. Depth is the constant worry at Murphy: a handful of injuries at the wrong positions can force sophomores into both-way duty against region opponents who dress twice as many players.
The roster’s youth cuts both ways. The players who endured the 0-10 seasons as freshmen and sophomores will be a year older and stronger in 2026, and the coaching staff has tried to frame those two losing seasons as apprenticeship rather than failure. Williams has emphasized in practices that the standard remains the same regardless of the record: effort on every rep, and results that come only from that effort.
“Chemistry is always going to play a major role in what you do as a team,” Williams said. “Football is the ultimate team sport, and having guys that are familiar with each other… that’s important. On the field, it’s very important to have that chemistry.” With a small roster and so many returning players who have started together since their freshman year, that chemistry is one asset Murphy holds in abundance.
A reshuffled staff
Williams, who is now solely focused on head-coaching duties after also serving as offensive coordinator last season, has reshuffled his staff for 2026. Wesley Harmon, who served as defensive coordinator last season after initially being brought in for the offensive side, will now run the offense, while Dariante Archible, who coached Murphy’s middle school team a year ago, takes over as defensive coordinator.
The moves put the staff’s familiarity with the roster to work on both sides of the ball. Harmon’s switch back to offense pairs him with the veteran offensive line, while Archible’s promotion means the defensive scheme will be installed by a coach who already knows many of the varsity players from their middle school years — continuity that matters when the roster is young and every practice rep is precious.
“We all grew up together, so we look forward to having a more productive defense this year than we had last year,” Williams said. The defensive side of the ball bore much of the scoring damage during the streak, and any improvement in the 42.3 points allowed per game would give Murphy’s offense more chances to stay in games into the fourth quarter.
Why the streak has lasted
Murphy’s decline reflects more than one program’s problems. The school once ranked among Mobile’s largest and most successful, producing generations of college and professional players, has seen its enrollment and its football numbers fall over the years as new schools opened across the county and district lines shifted. Competing in Region 1 against programs with larger feeder pipelines has made every season a structural challenge as much as a schematic one.
Murphy’s most recent playoff appearance came in 2019, when the Panthers finished 6-5, and its last playoff win came in the 7-5 season of 2011. The program’s most recent 10-win season was 2008, when it went 10-3 and reached the third round of the playoffs. Those seasons are within living memory of Murphy’s current seniors, and the coaching staff has leaned on them as proof that winning football at the school is possible — and recent.
Reversing the streak, in Williams’s telling, is less about a single game plan than about accumulation: keeping players eligible, keeping them healthy, keeping them in the program, and letting the experienced core of sophomores and juniors grow into the standard the staff has set. The 2026 season is the test of whether that approach is taking hold.
Practice habits have been the focus of the offseason. Williams has installed the same offense-to-defense rotation structure used at larger programs, with special-teams periods built into every session so that the small roster develops the depth chart discipline bigger schools get from numbers alone. Players who learn multiple positions become the insurance policy a 40-man roster requires.
The school community has a role too. Attendance at Murphy games and support from alumni have been quiet in recent seasons, and a first win — wherever it comes on the 2026 schedule — would do as much for the program’s recruiting within its own hallways as any scheme change. Coaches across the region note that participation follows success; at Murphy, the hope is that effort precedes it.
A different approach to scheduling
The Panthers open the 2026 season on Aug. 28 on the road against Park Crossing at Montgomery’s Cramton Bowl. Park Crossing enters the game on its own 22-game losing streak, though the Montgomery school gets a chance to snap that streak first, in a season-opening road game against Woodlawn on Aug. 21.
The opener pairs the two longest losing streaks in the state against each other, and for Murphy it represents the most winnable game on the schedule — a deliberate choice by Williams, who built the non-region slate around competitiveness rather than prestige. One of the two teams will leave Montgomery with its first victory in three years, and Williams has made clear he intends it to be his.
A trip to the Cramton Bowl also gives the Panthers a postseason-style stage for the reset they have been building toward. The historic Montgomery venue hosts high school and college games throughout the fall, and the season-opening setting underscores Williams’s scheduling philosophy: put young players in an environment that feels big, against an opponent their own size, and let them learn what it takes to finish.
“I just went on a schedule that I thought that we could be competitive with and found some competition, some games, that could probably match up with us more evenly than we did last year,” Williams said. “Our region is very tough. We’ve got tough teams, tough opponents in our region. So I wanted to match up some teams out of the region that were going to give us an opportunity to be on a more even playing field.”
Region 1 offers little relief. The classification’s Mobile-area region includes programs that regularly contend for deep playoff runs, and Murphy’s region games will demand more than the rebuilt roster can likely deliver this season. The non-region games are where the Panthers’ progress will be most measurable, and where a first win since October 2023 is most plausible.
For a program that has gone three calendar years without a victory, the goals for 2026 are correspondingly concrete: score points again after eight straight scoreless games, compete into the fourth quarters of region games, and convert the Aug. 28 opener’s opportunity into the kind of result that changes how a locker room feels about itself. Williams’s “we earn everything, nothing given” motto will be put to the test from the first snap at the Cramton Bowl, and the staff believes the foundation laid over two losing seasons is finally strong enough to bear it.
